Katherine
van Wormer, University of Northern Iowa, Department of Social Work

1Cultural Values in the Globalized Society

The 1980s, under the influence of
Reaganomics, helped launch a right wing backlash that was to come to fruition
under later US administrations. As claimed in a commemorative issue of Time magazine, Ronald Reagan “utterly remade the
political landscape…It was because of Reagan that Clinton had to promise to end
welfare as we know it” (Lacayo and Dickerson, 2004, 51). The legacy was to
involve extensive reduction in taxes for individuals at the higher income
levels, and for corporations, massive military spending, the decline of real
wages and worker benefits, reductions in affordable housing, and the dismantling
of the social welfare state. The weakening of trade barriers has created a
situation ripe for the demise of trade unions, the loss of U.S. manufacturing
jobs, and intense competition among workers throughout the world (Polack,
2004).

Policies and values are intertwined. As
the tides of political change come and go, and as the public mood shifts, so do
the social policies. And just as values play into the creation of policies, so
do policies into values. Change the policies (as happened under Reaganism) and
they soon become part of the status quo. The death penalty, corporal punishment
of children, restrictions-of-smoking laws are just a few examples of policies
that have both influenced and been influenced by the ethos of the time.

Sometimes, however, policies are enacted
during a progressive era and a backlash ensues against them. Consider
affirmative action laws, which have done much to equalize the playing field in
terms of educational and professional opportunities, for example. Today, especially
regarding women’s advances, there are strong counterforces at work. A backlash,
a counter-assault, which Faludi (1991) convincingly identified from events of
the 1980s, the Reagan period, is even more striking now at the dawn of the 21st
century. The following examples come to mind: attempts to stymie women’s
reproductive freedom, new coercive and highly punitive social welfare policies,
and the use of anti-conspiracy laws to punish the wives and partners of drug
dealers for their role in perpetuating or covering up crime. In the name of
equality, gender-neutral sentences have been inflicted upon women who are now
confined in record numbers in prisons built and run according to the male model
(Chesney-Lind and Pasko, 2003). This backlash, I believe, is related to
resentment by men who are in positions of power of women’s advances in the
professions. Ironically, the backlash is carried out against women who are
least able to take advantage of the new employment opportunities, women who get
into trouble with the law. Economically, women’s (and minorities’) gains are a
threat to white male privilege. As Pharr (2001) reminds us, “We have to look at
economics not only as the root cause of sexism but also as the underlying
driving force that keeps all the oppressions in place” (p. 144).

In the bestselling What’s
the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank (2004) explains the cultural divide
between the two American political parties in terms of a” 30 year backlash”
against a supposedly liberal establishment. Politicians both promote and
respond to this ideology (in which a reaction against same sex marriage plays a
prominent role). The end result is the phenomenon of blue collar workers voting
with Wall St. business interests. Economics, of course, is the true issue; the study
of economics today begins with forces of the global market.

2Globalization

The term globalization
which simply refers to an interconnectedness of persons across the world has
both positive and negative connotations. From a positive perspective, one marvels
at the technological revolution and the wealth of information at one’s
fingertips. From the more commonly articulated negative standpoint, consider
the masses of desperate and powerless workers pitted against each other in “a
race to the bottom.” Sweatshop wages and working conditions in the Global South
are mirrored in industrialized nations in the payment of wages so low as not to
represent a living wage and in an ever increasing gap in earnings between the
rich and the poor.

The current globalization of the economy
requires that social workers broaden their horizons and view many domestic
social justice issues within a global framework (Polack, 2004). That this
concept is making great inroads in the social work literature is revealed in a
search of Social Work Abstracts. There are 74
abstracts listed as of February, 2005. (Significantly, practically all the
references are negative).

Social workers can benefit from knowing
how the issues in their town or nation are played out in other towns and nations.
There is so much to learn of innovative practices and of possible solutions to
social problems that never would have been imagined without an international
exchange of information. Key areas of interest are child welfare policies, AIDS
prevention, substance abuse treatment, and health care provisions. An awareness
of varying global arrangements reveals not only possibilities but also barriers
due to differences in funding sources and cultural attitudes concerning the
source of income. Where there is a solid nationalized health care system in
place, for example, open-door, harm reduction treatment offerings may be
readily available. Emulation may be stifled elsewhere, however, without the
necessary government supports.

To study the major value orientation of
other lands is to realize the uniqueness of our own—the indomitable American
work ethic, the impetus for privacy and individual rights over the public good,
the elevation of nuclear family ties far above extended family obligations. And
lurking beneath all these issues is a boundless optimism that success is ours
if only we try.

Contained in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) are principles germane to the alleviation
of oppression and injustice. These principles provide a template for how the
state should treat its citizens socially, culturally, and economically. A
proposal for a county-funded, ethnic-sensitive substance abuse program, for
example, is in keeping with Article 25, which endorses the right to medical
care and necessary social services, Article 27, pertaining to participation in
the cultural life of the community and even with Article 16, which is directed
toward protection of the family. A proposal to reduce school violence through
anti-oppressive education can be guided by the principle found in Article 26,
which states that education should be directed to the promotion of tolerance
and to the furtherance of activities for the maintenance of peace. As backing
for proposals that challenge economic or social oppression, one even finds an
Article of general tolerance.

We are talking here of domestic policy as
viewed from the global perspective of international law. Some policy actions,
as Healy (2001) suggests, have a direct transnational impact; laws and
regulations pertaining to immigrants and foreign child adoptions are examples.
Globalization has the potential to transport traditional social policy analysis
into an ever-widening international arena, even to the extent, through
information technology, of helping people to influence their own governments to
consider human rights issues in foreign relations.

3Oppression

A search of Social
Work Abstracts (February, 2005) lists 235 journal abstracts that contain
the word oppression. This large number of listings
is indicative of the popularization of this term within social work. The
overwhelming majority of these articles, as indicated in their abstracts,
however, only use the term in a descriptive but not a theoretical sense. The dynamics
of oppression, in fact, have only rarely been studied in social work
literature. (Exceptions are from Britain, Dominelli (2002), Anti-Oppressive Social Work Theory and Practice, and
from the United States, Gil (1998) Confronting Injustice
and Oppression; Appleby, Colon & Hamilton (2001), Diversity, Oppression, and Social Functioning; and van
Wormer (2004), Confronting Oppression Restoring Justice).
All this may be changing, however, in conjunction with CSWE (2003) mandates to
incorporate material on oppression in the social work curriculum. The change
from the requirement to offer content on specific vulnerable populations such
as racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities in favor of amore generalized approach
is significant in that it represents a shift in focus from cultural
characteristics to structural factors in group marginalization. Standard 4.2
under Educational Policy states, “Programs integrate social and economic
justice content grounded in an understanding of distributive justice, human and
civil rights, and the global interconnections of oppression” (p.35).

The Canadian Association of Schools of
Social Work (2000) similarly, ensures that the student acquire “preparation in
transferable analysis of the multiple and intersecting bases of oppression, and
related practice skills” (Section 3.4.3) and more specifically, “an
understanding of oppression and healing of aboriginal peoples and implications
for social policy and social work practice” (Section 5.10 L).

As defined in The
Social Work Dictionary (Barker, 2003), oppression
is:

“the social act of
placing severe restrictions on an individual, group, or institution. Typically,
a government or political organization that is in power places these
restrictions formally or covertly on oppressed groups so that they may be
exploited and less able to compete with other social groups. The oppressed
individual or group is devalued, exploited, and deprived of privileges by the
individual or group who has more power” (pp. 306-307).

Some of the key words used in this
definition—“power,” “exploited,” “deprived,” “privileges”—are key variables
related to oppression that crop up again and again in discussion. Each notion
is ingrained in the institutional arrangements of racism, sexism,
ethnocentrism, ableism, heterosexism, classism, and sectarianism (Appleby,
Colon and Hamilton, 2001). In each form of oppression—economic, racial, ethnic,
sexual—a dominant group receives the unearned advantage or privilege, and a
targeted group is denied the advantage (Ayvazian, 2001).

Dalymple & Burke (1995) define
oppression as inhumane or degrading treatment of a group or individual based on
some defining characteristic. Societies are non-oppressive,
notes Gil (1998), when all people are considered and treated as equals, and
have equal rights and responsibilities concerning their land, resources,
politics, and bodies, accordingly. Oppression, like non-oppression, is a word
favored by social activists, and a central term of political discourse; it
would not ordinarily be used by the mainstream and is inconsistent with the
language of individualism that dominates U.S. politics (Young, 1990). In
traditional usage, the word might be used to describe conditions in a foreign
country such as North Korea or pre-occupied Iraq.

Anti-oppressive practice or theory is a
term widely used in all the English-speaking countries of the world except for
the United States. According to this formulation, the assumption is that
society is generally oppressive and that the social workers must do their best
to offset this. Anti-oppressive practice is about
minimizing power differences in society and maximizing the rights to which all
people are entitled (Dalrymple and Burke, 1995; Dominelli, 2002). In her book
on anti-oppressive theory and practice,Dominelli
perceives the context of social work practice within a globalizing economy.
From this perspective, anti-oppressive social work is concerned about the
deleterious effects that macro-level forces can have on people’s daily lives.

Payne (1997) likens anti-oppressive
practice to an empowerment approach because of its attention to power
differentials in worker/client relationships and the need to help clients gain
control of their lives. Workers, as Payne suggests, can avoid oppressing (and
thereby empower) clients through partnership, client choice, and seeking
changes in the agency and wider systems that adversely affect clients.
Empowering practice begins by acknowledging that structural injustices have
prevented many individuals and groups from receiving the treatment and
resources to which they are entitled (van Wormer, 2004). Empowerment practice,
as Gutiérrez and Lewis (1999) suggest, requires social workers to be agents of
change, to help people gain or regain power in their lives, and to work toward
social justice at the societal level.

In summary, anti-oppressive and
empowerment practice are direct responses to individual and group experiences
of oppression. Oppression theory is the guiding framework for such responses. Current
trends in economic globalization compel us to address these issues. The
incorporation of theories of oppression the social work curriculum entails a
shift in focus from race to racism, sex to sexism, ethnicity to ethnocentrism,
and from oppressed to oppressor. This shift is far more radical than it would
first appear from a quick reading of CSWE’s revised curriculum standards
because now the focus is structural instead of individual, general rather than
specific. The focus is on societal practices that perpetuate oppression rather than
on learning about cultural characteristics of a given national group or tribe,
and such a focus can be extremely threatening to the status quo. What actual
effect the curriculum change will have on the field of social work in the USA,
it is too early to tell but it is potentially significant.

4Social Exclusion

A closely related concept to oppression
is social exclusion, a term far less familiar to
social workers in the United States than to their European counterparts. A
search of Social Work Abstracts (February, 2005)
produced 19 abstracts related to social exclusion. All the references were
European except for one: Finn & Jacobson’s article in the Journal of Social Work Education on just practice. Social exclusion is defined in TheSocial WorkDictionary as
the “marginalization of people or areas and the imposition of barriers that
restrict them from access to opportunities to fully integrate with the larger
society” (Barker, 2003, 403). Social exclusion applies to both countries that
lose out in global competition and to classes of people within nations in the
grip of poverty or living with mental or physical disabilities.

The concept of social exclusion goes
beyond the mere words “social” and “exclusion” into the political realm.
Embodied in this concept is a framework concerning political and economic
process. The beauty of this formulation as opposed to the pejorative earlier
term, the underclass, is its placement of the onus
on the people who are doing something to other people. The central tenet of the
underclass or culture of poverty argument, in contrast, is that miserable
conditions are self-induced—the poor do it to themselves (Byrne, 1999).
Subscribers to this theoretical framework acknowledge the influence of global
economic transformation on social cohesion at the national level. These impacts
vary considerably across class and racial categories. The literature on social
exclusion, as Mitchell (2000) notes, highlights the multi-dimensionality of
disadvantage on purely economic grounds to include marginalization through the
denial of civil, political, and social rights of citizenship.

My prediction is that use of the term social exclusion will gain currency on the US side of
the Atlantic due to the rapid transfer of information related to the new
technologies. We know from past experience that concepts such as harm reduction, oppression, and restorative
justice, introduced in one part of the world have been widely adopted
elsewhere. With regard to social exclusion, the
European Union’s adoption of this terminology provides a credibility as well as
media coverage that should promote its adoption globally, especially as our
interest in human rights expands.

Van Wormer (2004) discusses sexism,
heterosexism, racism, classism, ethnocentrism, ageism, and sectarianism as
forms of social exclusion. Kunstreich (2003) investigated social exclusion of
Jews in Nazi Germany and social workers’ complicity in this process. The final
part of the article considers North American social workers’ compliance in exclusionary
legislation such as welfare reform and mass incarceration of offenders.

5Human Rights

A search of Social
Work Abstracts (February, 2005) produces 131 listings for human rights. This high number attests to a serious
interest by the profession in this subject area. A content analysis further
indicates special concerns in regard to social welfare rights and minority
issues. The International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) (2004) provides a
strong endorsement of human rights as a framework for social work policy.
Although NASW (1996) does not yet include the term human
rights in its code of ethics, the code, as Reichert (2003) indicates,
bears an uncanny resemblance to important human rights documents, especially to
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Reichert’s reference is to Category
6 of the code of ethics which urges social workers to engage in social and
political action that seeks to ensure that all people have equal access to
employment and resources, to expand opportunity for all people with special
regard for those who are “disadvantaged, oppressed, and exploited” (NASW, 1996,
Standard 6.04b). A human rights platform sees welfare aid for the poor as an
entitlement, not a privilege; access to education and health care are both listed
as human rights in the Universal Declaration. The newly revised IFSW-IASSW Code
of Ethics includes a strong endorsement of all the international human rights
treaties.

In its most recent manual of policy
statements, NASW (2003) declared social work a human rights profession. In all
fields of social work practice, according to this statement, whether with
individuals, families, or communities, social work must be grounded in human
rights. Under the guidelines of CSWE (2003) social work programs integrate concerns
of social and economic justice content grounded in “human and civil rights”
within the curriculum (Section 1VC).

From a Canadian perspective, Watkinson
(2001) argues that the inclusion of human rights documents and legal decisions
arising from them are an essential part of social work education. Human rights
laws, moreover, as Watkinson indicates, “provide a valuable theoretical and
practical base for assisting social change” (p. 271). Because Canada was a
signatory (unlike the United States) to the Covenant on Economic, Social and
Political Rights, social workers in that country can use the document as a
touchstone by which to examine social policy and to hold the government
accountable: All the provinces in Canada, as well as the federal government, in
fact have human rights legislation that is administered by a Human Rights
Commission. For Canadian social workers, as Watkinson argues, human rights laws
can be a valuable tool for advocacy for social and economic justice within the
era of globalization.

In light of the focus in the
international media today on international law and violations at Abu Ghraib
Prison in Irak, and in light of publicity concerning the denial of legal rights
to gays and lesbians, social work’s interest in human rights is timely.

6Other Concepts Worthy of Social Work Attention

Harm reduction and restorative justice
are two additional concepts that I predict will soon be a part of the U.S.
social work vocabulary. These concepts, in fact, are well known to social
workers throughout the English speaking world and, increasingly, in the United
States. The term harm reduction appeared for the
first time in the latest edition of The Social Work
Dictionary where it is defined as “a pragmatic, public health approach
to reducing the negative consequences of some harmful behavior rather than
eliminating or curing the problem (Barker, 2003, 190).

The aim of harm reduction is to reduce
unhealthy practices as much as is feasible in the belief that taking small
steps is better than nothing. To prevent the spread of AIDS, for example,
treatment priorities may prescribe moderate doses of the drug of choice or of a
synthetic substitute; dirty needles may be exchanged free of charge for clean
ones. This approach has been considered controversial in the United States
where moralism often wins out over pragmatism. Because the philosophy of harm
reduction is consistent with the empowerment perspective of social work,
however, we can expect that the profession will pay far more heed to its
principles and practices in the near future (see van Wormer, 2005).

Restorative justice is a concept that still has a way to go in U.S. social work circles
although it is widely known to correctional personnel. The fact that no
definition yet appears in Barker’s Social Work Dictionary
is indicative of a lack of broad-based recognition of the importance of
this concept to social work. My personal prediction is that in the next edition
this term will be included. A search of Social Work
Abstracts as of June, 2004 produced only six abstracts. Significantly,
however, most of them were recent, a fact that is seemingly indicative of a
trend.

My prediction that restorative justice is
a concept whose time has come is based on three major developments. First, I am
anticipating a heightened influence of Canadian social work on the U.S.
profession, thanks to a first-ever collaboration between the two countries
through joint membership in the North American section of the International
Federation of Social Workers (Stoesen, 2003). Canadian social workers are well
versed in restorative principles, which they utilize in practice with youthful
offenders and school situations. The second major influence relates to
indigenous and international knowledge: family group conferencing is a restorative
method from New Zealand that is being modeled worldwide. Thirdly, the most
extensive evaluation research on victim-offender mediation is being conducted
at the Center of Restorative Justice and Peacemaking, which is housed at the
University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work. A recent article in NASW News
highlighted this research under the headline, “Restorative Justice: A Model of
Healing: Philosophy Consistent with Social Work Values (Fred, 2005).”

Because so many in the profession work with
persons who are ordered by courts into treatment as offenders, not to mention
all the persons victimized by crime who come into treatment to work on issues
of traumatization, it is fitting that the Center of Restorative Justice and
Peacemaking at the University of Minnesota has a social work connection. Social
work practitioners often are trained through field placements for work in
juvenile and adult correctional institutions and through coursework to provide
counseling for personal issues and substance abuse treatment. Nevertheless,
compared to other areas of social work practice, the clash between social work
values and societal values is at its most pronounced here, in the correctional
system. Whereas the general purpose of the criminal justice system is to punish
offenders and deter others from law-breaking behavior by setting a harsh
example, social work’s mission, as we know, is to help people help themselves
and to challenge social injustice (NASW, 1996). Happily, the restorative
justice philosophy can form a harmonious link between the criminal justice and
social work fields.

7Conclusion

That a paradigm shift is occurring and
that this shift in ideology and politics is related to economics and social
globalization are major arguments of this paper. The present globalization of
the economy has profound implications for social work, not all of these are
negative, by any means. The positive side relates to the expanded information
technologies which bring social work trends and innovations from one part of
the world to the doorstep of other parts of the world. For example, consider
the rapid spread of knowledge concerning treatments for disease and their
ailments.

From a negative standpoint, literature
from the social sciences typically points to the impact of global competition
on employment conditions and social welfare benefits. The standardization of
policies in the global age is such that the harried service worker in rich
nations has more in common with the sweatshop worker in poor regions of the
world than with the bankers and CEOs in his or her own country. Trends toward
privatization and consolidation for greater efficiency are universal trends.
Because social work is the profession most closely linked with social welfare
and with working with marginalized populations such as immigrants, the
unemployed, and families who are homeless, a global perspective on personal
troubles is paramount.

For the examination of trends in social
work, this article relied on four major sources of information: CSWE’s Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards; The Social Work Dictionary (Barker, 2003); NASWS’s Social Work Speaks), and Social
Work Abstracts. The terms I selected were chosen because of the
challenge they represent to life in the globalized community. Each concept we
examined - - globalization, oppression, social exclusion, human rights, harm
reduction, and restorative justice - - is on the cutting edge of social work
theory. Each concept is an active part of the European (and Canadian and Australian)
social work vernacular. My prediction is that, due to the global
interconnectedness among schools of social work today and because of the
importance of such concepts to our understanding of today’s world, these
concepts will become increasingly familiar to American social workers as well.

The significance of the terminology
discussed in this article is its bearing on the social action component in
social work. Work is necessary to confront the most onerous aspects of
globalization, the oppression of socially excluded populations. Such efforts
can be guided from a human rights platform. Harm reduction and restorative
justice are two examples of person-centered approaches, the former from health
care, the latter from criminal justice that closely resonate with social work
values. Through heightened consciousness concerning these concepts, social
workers, following the profession’s commitment to social justice and political
action, can make a difference in both small and major ways. For strategies for
influencing government policies see Schneider & Lester, (2001) and van
Wormer (2004).

References

Al-Krenawi,
A. and Graham, J. (eds.) 2003: Multicultural
social work in Canada: Working with diverse ethno-racial communities. Oxford,
England: Oxford University Press.

Ayvazian,
A. 2001: Interrupting the cycle of oppression:
The role of allies as agents of change, in: Rothenberg, P.S. (ed.): Race, class
and gender in the United States: An integrated study. New York: W.H. Freeman,
pp. 609-615.